Didn’t we just run this story? I can’t tell if it’s the turkey or the beer but I’m getting the strangest sense of deja vu. It looks like if you want to play Ghost Recon: Future Soldier when it launches early next year you better go ahead and just play the free-to-play Ghost Recon Online. The reason? You guessed it: piracy.

Ghost Recon Online producer Sébastien Arnoult told PC Gamer the free-to-play model of that game was specifically designed to combat both piracy and the need for DRM. Read on for some more on the subject.

“When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind.

“We have to adapt, we have to embrace this instead of pushing it away. That’s the main reflection behind Ghost Recon Online and the choice we’ve made to go in this direction.”

While it’s nice to see they at least had their potential paying customers in mind rather than focusing on the ones that WON’T buy the game, it’s still rather alarming.

PC gaming has seen a great surge in popularity recently and my friends who consider themself the “PC Master Race” are more frequent than ever, but are we headed back to the old days again? If everybody stops developing PC games, there will be nothing to pirate. I can’t say it’s the smartest way of combating piracy but it’s the most efficient.